Scientists create new class of “Turing patterns” in colonies of E. coli
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Maybe I'm just too deep into my Theory of Computation class right now, but this sounds a lot like a closure (or lack thereof) property in the set of "homogenous tissue", no?
It's related to cellular automata tho, which are basically very simple reaction-diffusion systems, and I can't quite wrap my head around it but certain automata have been proven to be able to simulate any computation (I guess with the right initial state?) [2] Recently there's been more work on getting analog computations out of chemical reactions, you can check out [3] and its footnote "A programmable chemical computer with memory and pattern recognition".
Life itself you might say is a very high level abstraction over such chemical computers, and I guess the article posted here is an example of finally building those abstractions ourselves, being synthetic biology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110#The_proof_of_universa... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer
(Well, except for the occasional experiments where people let GPT-2 or 3 post for them to see what happens).